Matthias Ruth is a full professor with appointments in the Policy School and in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Prior to Northeastern, Professor Ruth was at the University of Maryland where he was the Roy F. Weston Chair in Natural Economics, Director of the Center for Integrative Environmental Research at the Division of Research, Director of the Environmental Policy Program at the School of Public Policy, and Co-Director of the Engineering and Public Policy Program. His research focuses on dynamic modeling of natural resource use, industrial and infrastructure systems analysis, and environmental economics and policy. His theoretical work heavily draws on concepts from engineering, economics and ecology, while his applied research utilizes methods of non-linear dynamic modeling as well as adaptive and anticipatory management. Applications of his work cover the full spectrum from local to regional, to national and global environmental challenges, as well as the investment and policy opportunities these challenges present.

Professor Ruth has published 12 books and over 120 papers and book chapters in the scientific literature. He is a founder of Ecological Economics, serves on the boards of numerous journals and scientific organizations, is a founding Co-editor in Chief of the international science journal Urban Climate, and collaborates extensively with scientists and policy makers worldwide. Recent publications include Distributional Impacts of Climate Change: Social and Economic Implications and Dynamic Modeling of Diseases and Pest.

Ruth’s research has been supported by government agencies and private sources including: the National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Organization, Natural Resources Defense Council, Research Council of Norway, German Ministry of Science, Education and Technology and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and Department of the Environment, and Environmental Defense.

Graduate Program Directors

Christopher J. Bosso Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh Director, Nanotechnology & Society Research Group Professor of Public Policy

Expertise: Public Policy, Environmental and Food Policy, Technology and Policy

A professor of public policy, Bosso writes on the governance dimensions of emerging technologies, environment, and food, the tactics and strategies pursued by environmental groups, and on public policymaking in general. He is editor of and contributor to Governing Uncertainty: Environmental Regulation in the Age of Nanotechnology (Resources for the Future / Earthscan Press, 2010). His 2005 book, Environment, Inc.: From Grassroots to Beltway (University Press of Kansas), received the 2006 Caldwell Award for best book in environmental policy and politics from the American Political Science Association.

Bosso is also principal investigator on the National Science Foundation-funded project, “Nanotechnology in the Public Interest” (SES #0609078), co-principal investigator on the NSF-funded project “Designing and Integrating Life Cycle Assessment Methods for Nanomanufacturing Scale-up,” (SNM-1120329), a senior researcher with the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing at Northeastern, and director of the Nanotechnology and Society Research Group, which conducts research on regulatory and environmental dimensions of nanotechnology and related emerging technologies.

Clayton-Matthews is co-editor of Massachusetts Benchmarks, a joint publication of the University of Massachusetts and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston that presents timely information and analysis about the performance of the Massachusetts economy. He is also a Director of the New England Economic Project, a group of economists and managers from academia, business, and government who study and forecast the New England economy.

Previously, Clayton-Matthews has worked as an economist and policy analyst for the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, the Social Welfare Research Institute at Boston College, and DRI/McGraw-Hill. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Boston College.

Professor Shatkin has a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs (75%) and the School of Architecture (25%). His research focuses primarily on globalization and urban poverty in Southeast Asian cities. He is the author of Collective Action and Urban Poverty Alleviation: Community Organizations and the Struggle for Shelter in Manila. He has published articles in a number of journals, including Urban Studies, Environment and Planning, The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Cities, and the International Development Planning Review.

Prior to coming to Northeastern, Shatkin was an Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. He was also a faculty associate in the Center for South Asian Studies and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

Thomas J. Vicino Ph.D., Public Policy, University of Maryland Graduate School, Baltimore Associate Professor of Political Science Director, Master of Public Administration Program

Expertise: Public Policy, Urban Politics, Urban and Metropolitan Development

Prof. Vicino is Director of the Master of Public Administration Program. He is also the academic advisor for the Political Science Class of 2015.He teaches at the graduate level in the MPA Program and the Master of Urban and Regional Policy (MURP) Program. At the undergraduate level, he teaches in the Political Science major and the Urban Studies minor.

Prof. Vicino is near-fluent in Portuguese. He is a strong advocate for global and experiential education. His study abroad program, Brazil in the 21st Century, translates ‘the global’ and ‘the experiential’ into real opportunities for students.

In his spare time, he enjoys global travel, playing the trumpet, and photography as well as exploring good Italian food. Born in the District of Columbia, he was raised in Columbia, Maryland.

Laurie Dopkins provides leadership and coordination for the graduate programs within the Policy School, including the Master’s in Urban and Regional Policy, Master’s in Law and Public Policy and Master of Public Administration.

Immediately prior to coming to Northeastern in 2008, Laurie was Associate Research Professor at George Mason University where she taught evaluation research methods and led community-based action research projects involving collaborations between nonprofit organizations, government agencies, businesses, private foundations, and multiple units within the university.

Before joining the faculty at Mason, Dopkins had her own consulting firm in Atlanta where she worked with public sector agencies, foundations, and nongovernmental organizations on policy research and program evaluation in a wide range of areas including children and youth, community and economic development, maternal and child health, education, and immigration. Dopkins has broad experience in the management, analysis and evaluation of policies and programs, including the development of accountability and outcomes monitoring systems. She has specialized in developing collaborative evaluation techniques that enhance evaluation capacity and utilization among diverse stakeholder groups, including policymakers and program managers, service providers and clients, community leaders and advocates.

Dopkins has published dozens of evaluation and research reports for foundations, government organizations, nonprofit agencies, and community groups. Her specific areas of interest in the field of evaluation are social indicators, organizational learning, program theory and logic models, evaluation capacity building, evidence based policy and practice, and the translation of knowledge to action. Dopkins received her Ph.D in Sociology from Rutgers University in 1984.

Len Albright is an assistant professor of sociology and public policy with appointments of 25% in the School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs and 75% in Sociology. Albright recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and was a recipient of the University’s Phoenix Fellowship from 2004-07. His dissertation, supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the MacArthur Foundation, is an ethnographic study of an affordable housing complex in a suburban New Jersey community.

Trained as an environmental sociologist, Albright is also researching issues of community mobilization around hydraulic fracturing and natural gas extraction in Pennsylvania. He has done extensive ethnographic research on class and racial boundaries within suburban communities.

Albright has also written on the implementation of judicial rulings (such as the Mount Laurel decision) in support of fair housing in the United States. A native of Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, Len maintains an interest in the history and impact of the Mt. Laurel Decisions, a series of NJ Supreme Court decisions that advocated for inclusionary zoning and housing equality.

Barry Bluestone is founding Director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy and founding Dean of the School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs.

Before assuming these posts, Bluestone spent twelve years at the University of Massachusetts at Boston as the Frank L. Boyden Professor of Political Economy and as a Senior Fellow at the University’s John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs. He was the Founding Director of UMass Boston’s Ph.D. Program in Public Policy. Before coming to UMass in the Fall of 1986, he taught economics at Boston College for fifteen years and was Director of the University’s Social Welfare Research Institute. Professor Bluestone was raised in Detroit, Michigan and attended the University of Michigan where he received his B.A., M.A. and finally his Ph.D. in economics in 1974.

At the Dukakis Center, Bluestone has led research projects on housing, local economic development, state and local public finance, and the manufacturing sector in Massachusetts. At the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, he has co-chaired the Open Classroom series, a graduate seminar on critical social issues open free to the public each semester. He was also part of the team that developed the school’s Master’s Program in Urban and Regional Policy (MURP).

As a political economist, Bluestone has written widely in the areas of income distribution, business and industrial policy, labor-management relations, higher education finance, and urban and regional economic development. He contributes regularly to academic, as well as popular journals, and is the author of eleven books. In 1982, he published The Deindustrialization of America (co-authored with the late Bennett Harrison) which analyzed the restructuring of American industry and its economic and social impact on workers and communities. A sequel published in 1988, The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America, also co-authored with Harrison, investigated how economic policies have contributed to growing inequality. In earlier books, Bluestone investigated the low-wage labor market, the aircraft industry, and the revolution in the retail trade sector. In 1992, Negotiating the Future: A Labor Perspective on American Business was published. Co-authored with his father, Irving Bluestone, the book traces the history of labor-management relations since World War II and offers the concept of the “Enterprise Compact” as an approach to industrial relations which can boost productivity, improve product quality and innovation, and enhance employment security. Korean, Spanish, and Japanese editions of this book have been published.

In 2000, Bluestone published two new books. The first of these, co-authored again with Harrison and titled Growing Prosperity: The Battle for Growth with Equity in the 21st Century, investigates the prospects for faster economic growth in the U.S. It was published by Houghton Mifflin and the Twentieth Century Fund. The second, The Boston Renaissance: Race, Space, and Economic Change in an American Metropolis, co-authored with Mary Huff Stevenson and published by the Russell Sage Foundation, was the culmination of nearly five years of research on the new Boston economy. It recounts the industrial and demographic revolution in post-World War II Boston and its impact on racial and ethnic attitudes, residential segregation, and the labor market success of whites, blacks, and Latinos.

Bluestone’s latest book published in 2008 and co-authored with Mary Huff Stevenson and Russell Williams is a major textbook entitled The Urban Experience: Economics, Society, and Public Policy. This work, rich in theory and applied policy, was written for an interdisciplinary audience and can be used at either the undergraduate or graduate level.

As part of his work, Bluestone spends a considerable amount of time consulting with trade unions, with industry groups, and with various federal and state government agencies. He was Executive Adviser to the Governor’s Commission on the Future of Mature Industries in Massachusetts and has worked with the economic development departments of various states. He has testified before Congressional committees and lectures regularly before university, labor, community, and business groups. He appears frequently on local and national radio. Bluestone is also a founding member of the Economic Policy Institute, along with Robert Reich, Lester Thurow, Robert Kuttner, Ray Marshall, and Jeff Faux. In 2006, he served on the transition team for Governor Deval Patrick.

He currently serves as a member of the advisory council to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development as well as the Massachusetts Executive Office of Administration and Finance. He served on the Governor’s Economic Development Strategy Council and is now an executive board member of the Governor’s Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative. From 2007-2010, he served as a member of the Community Affairs Research Advisory Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He is a past board member of the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (WHAT) and currently as a board member of the Lyric Stage of Boston.

In his spare time, when he was younger, he used to compete in team triathlons as a bicycle racer — fortunately with a team otherwise comprised of orthopedic surgeons and an internist. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife Mary Ellen Colten. Their son Joshua is an undergraduate at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

James ConnollyPh.D., Urban Planning, Columbia University Assistant Professor, Public Policy & Political Science

James Connolly is an assistant professor of public policy & political science, with appointments of 75% in the School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs and 25% in political science. Connolly previously served as a staff researcher at the Earth Institute’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) and at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation’s Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) where he developed expertise in spatial analytic tools including ArcGIS and spatial statistics. At these labs he analyzed global poverty and mapped data on the movements of recently released prisoners through New York City, among other projects. He has also co-authored several reports on urban environmental stewardship with the University of Maryland’s Program on Society and the Environment. His current research examines community development and mainstream environmental coalitions in state-level urban environmental policies. His interests also include analyzing how the institutions that shape urban environmental land use policy are structured (spatially and politically) and how they are changed. He has published articles in journals including The Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Landscape and Urban Planning, and Environmental Management.

William Dickens is University Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Economics at Northeastern University, Boston. He holds a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. He is currently co-director of a major international research project on wage rigidity, a collaborative effort involving The Brookings Institution, the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the European Central Bank, and economists from 13 country teams.

Prior to his appointment at Northeastern in 2008, Professor Dickens was Thomas Schelling Visiting Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He is also a non-resident senior fellow in the Economics Studies Program at The Brookings Institution (where he was in residence from 1994 to 2007). In 2008-09, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation where he pursued writing and research as part of an interdisciplinary group studying the malleability of cognitive ability. Professor Dickens was formerly a senior economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, Visiting Assistant Professor at the Sloan School of Management, M.I.T., and a consultant for The World Bank. He holds a B.A. in Social Studies from Bard College and a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T.

Michael DukakisJ.D., Harvard Law SchoolDistinguished Professor of Political Science and Public PolicyGovernor of Massachusetts (1975-1979, 1983-1991)1988 Democratic Nominee for President of the United States

Michael Stanley Dukakis was born in Brookline, Massachusetts on November 3, 1933. His parents, Panos and Euterpe (Boukis) Dukakis both emigrated from Greece to the mill cities of Lowell and Haverhill, Massachusetts before marrying and settling in the town of Brookline, just outside Boston. Dukakis graduated from Brookline High School (1951), Swarthmore College (1955), and Harvard Law School (1960). He served for two years in the United States Army, sixteen months of which he spent with the support group to the United Nations delegation of the Military Armistice Commission in Munsan, Korea.

Dukakis began his political career as an elected Town Meeting Member in the town of Brookline. He was elected chairman of his town’s Democratic organization in 1960 and won a seat in the Massachusetts Legislature in 1962. He served four terms as a legislator, winning reelection by an increasing margin each time he ran. In 1970 he was the Massachusetts Democratic Party’s nominee for Lieutenant Governor and the running mate of Boston Mayor Kevin White in the year’s gubernatorial race which they lost to Republicans Frank Sargent and Donald Dwight.

Dukakis won his party’s nomination for Governor in 1974 and beat Sargent decisively in November of that year. He inherited a record deficit and record high unemployment and is generally credited with digging Massachusetts out of one of its worst financial and economic crises in history. But the effort took its toll, and Dukakis was defeated in the Democratic primary in 1978 by Edward King. Dukakis came back to defeat King in 1982 and was reelected to an unprecedented third four-year term in 1986 by one of the largest margins in history. In 1986, his colleagues in the National Governors’ Association voted him the most effective governor in the nation.

Dukakis won the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States in 1988 but was defeated by George Bush. Soon thereafter, he announced that he would not be a candidate for reelection as governor. After leaving office in January 1991, Dukakis and his wife, Kitty, spent three months at the University of Hawaii where Dukakis was a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of Public Health. While at the University of Hawaii, he taught courses in political leadership and health policy and led a series of public forums on the reform of the nation’s health-care system. There has been increasing public interest in Hawaii’s first-in-the-nation universal health insurance system and the lessons that can be learned from it as the nation debates the future of health care in America.

Since June 1991, Dukakis has been a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University and Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy at UCLA. His research has focused on national health care policy reform and the lessons that national policy makers can learn from state reform efforts. Recently, he and former U.S. Senator Paul Simon authored a book entitled How to Get Into Politics-and Why which is designed to encourage young people to think seriously about politics and public service as a career.

Joan FitzgeraldPh.D., Pennsylvania State UniversityProfessor, School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs Director and Professor, Law and Public Policy Program

Expertise: Urban and State Economic Development, Urban Sustainability and Climate Change Policy and Planning, Workforce Development

For the past several years Joan has served as Director of the Law and Public Policy program (LPP) at Northeastern University. The Law and Public Policy program is known primarily for its PhD program, but in recent years Joan has also redesigned the master’s degree as a professional graduate program.

Joan’s current research includes work on “Emerald Cities”, a comprehensive research project that examines how U.S. and Western European cities address the interrelated issues of global warming, energy dependence and opportunities for green economic development. Based from the findings of her research, this potential includes building new technology-based industry clusters, improving the efficiency of production in existing manufacturing processes, and creating well-paying green jobs in construction, manufacturing, and entirely new advanced technology sectors.

Prior to her work on “Emerald Cities”, Joan has written for several journals and regularly advises government officials on new “green-growth strategies”. Her recent publications include her 2002 economic development book, Economic Revitalization: Strategies and Cases for City and Suburb, Moving Up in the New Economy (2006), Emerald Cities (2010) and recent articles in the American Prospect focusing on green building and renewable energy.

Before coming to Northeastern University, Joan taught urban policy and public affairs at the New School University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Ohio State University.

James Alan Fox Ph.D., University of PennsylvaniaLipman Family Professor of Criminal Justice Professor of Law and Public Policy

James Alan Fox is The Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law and Public Policy at Northeastern University.

He has written 18 books, including The Will to Kill: Making Sense of Senseless Murder, Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder, and Violence and Security on Campus: From Preschool to College. He has published dozens of journal and magazine articles, primarily in the areas of multiple murder, youth crime, school and campus violence, workplace violence, and capital punishment. He has also published over 200 op-ed columns in newspapers around the country, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and USAToday. He writes regularly for USA Today as a member of its Board of Contributors, and previously blogged on “Crime and Punishment” for the Boston Globe (2011-2014) and wrote a bi-weekly column in the Boston Herald (2006-2007). He has appeared frequently on national television programs, including the Today Show, Meet the Press, Dateline, 20/20,and Oprah, and is frequently interviewed by the press. He was also profiled in a two-part cover story in USAToday, which described him as “arguably the nation’s foremost criminologist,” in feature stories in the New York Times and theScientific American, as well as in other media outlets. He served as a consulting contributor for Fox News following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and as an NBC News Analyst during the DC Sniper case.

Fox often gives lectures and expert testimony, including over 100 keynote or campus-wide addresses around the country, 16 appearances before the U.S. Congress, White House meetings with President and Mrs. Clinton and Vice President Gore on youth violence, private briefings to Attorney General Reno on trends in violence, and a presentation for Princess Anne of Great Britain. He served on President Clinton’s advisory committee on school shootings, and a Department of Education Expert Panel on Safe, Disciplined and Drug-Free Schools. He chaired a blue ribbon panel for the city of Seattle investigating the March 2006 Capitol Hill massacre. He has served as a visiting fellow with the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics focusing on the measurement of homicide trends. Finally, he was honored in 2007 by the Massachusetts Committee against the Death Penalty with the Hugo Adam Bedau Award for excellence in capital punishment scholarship and by Northeastern University with the 2008 Klein Lectureship.

Brian Helmuth will be joining us in January 2013 as professor of environmental science and public policy. He comes to us from the University of South Carolina where he was Professor of Biological Sciences in the Environment and Sustainability Program and Marine Science Program. He also served as Director of the Environment & Sustainability Program. His research explores the effects of climate and climate change on the physiology and ecology of marine organisms. Specifically, he uses thermal engineering techniques, including a combination of field work, remote sensing and mathematical modeling, to explore the ways in which the environment determines the body temperatures of coastal marine animals such as mussels and sea stars. A major goal of this approach (funded by NASA and NOAA) is to predict where and when the effects of climate change are likely to occur so that we can mitigate these effects, a method of “ecological triage.” To date Helmuth’s work has centered primarily on temperate rocky intertidal systems in the United States and Europe, but recent work funded by the NOAA Ecofore Program has expanded to include salt marsh ecosystems throughout the U.S.

Helmuth also works with local teachers to develop educational materials relevant to national science standards, and to bring the excitement of science to the classroom. He is actively involved in the South Carolina chapter of the National Marine Educators Association. A major goal of his approach is to make our research relevant to policy makers, resource managers, and the general public at large.

Timothy Hoff is Associate Professor of Management, Healthcare Systems, and Health Policy with appointments of 25% in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and 75% in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. He is a nationally recognized organizational and medical sociologist in the study of U.S. health reform implementation, health care quality, primary care, and physician behavior. In addition, he is a leading voice on the use of qualitative methods in health services research. He has published over 40 articles, several book chapters, and a full-length book entitled Practice Under Pressure: Primary Care Physicians and Their Work in the 21st Century, a sociological analysis of the everyday world of primary care physicians which received an Outstanding Academic Title award from Choice Magazine in 2010.

His health care research, which examines the sociological dynamics of health care workers and work settings and how they influence system performance, has won national awards from the American Sociological Association, Academy of Management, and Society for Applied Anthropology. In 2012, he was named as a “101 Most Influential Professors of Public Health” by MPHProgramsList.com, an online service for public health student education.

Before coming to Northeastern University, Dr. Hoff was a faculty member at the University at Albany School of Public Health where he taught health policy and management courses and was a two-time winner of the school’s excellence in teaching award. Dr. Hoff has also been a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s Templeton College of Management, Chair of the Healthcare Management Division of the Academy of Management, and is on several health care journal editorial boards.

He serves as a consultant to numerous agencies and organizations including the American Cancer Society and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Hoff is currently PI on a federal grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, studying patient-centered medical home implementation. Other current research interests include the restructuring of primary care delivery in the United States, the changing nature of the health professional workforce and its impact on system outcomes like quality and access, and articulating new models of professionalism that better fit with the realities of contemporary workplaces and workers.

Hoff earned his Ph.D. in public administration from the University of Albany.

Benedict Jimenez Ph.D., University of Illinois Professor of Poltical Science

Benedict S. Jimenez (PhD, University of Illinois) is the recipient of the 2014 Clarence N. Stone Early Career Scholar Award and the 2013 Paul A. Volcker Junior Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association, and the 2009 Donald C. Stone Junior Scholar Award from the American Society for Public Administration. He is an external member of the Municipal Fiscal Health Analysis Working Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Formerly Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, his research examines how sub-national governments finance, manage and provide local public goods. He studies these issues in the U.S. and in the context of developing countries. Using theories and concepts from organization theory and public management, and public finance and budgeting, Benedict’s research has explored three distinct but inter-related areas of inquiries in the fields of state and local public management and finance:

Research area 1: How the structure of the state and local public sector (fiscal decentralization, local government fragmentation) and the relationship among levels and types of governments (competition or cooperation) influence the financing and provision of public services.

Research area 2: How management processes (performance management, strategic planning, and decision processes and structures) affect the fiscal performance of state and local governments.

Research area 3: How citizens and information technology shape the process and substance of local decision-making, including fiscal policymaking.

Dr. Alicia Sasser Modestino is an associate professor with appointments in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the Department of Economics. Previously, Modestino was a Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston where she lead numerous research projects on regional economic and policy issues for the New England Public Policy Center. In that role, she frequently advised policymakers and business leaders and testified on key pieces of legislation related to labor market policies. Her work has appeared in journals such as Regional Science and Urban Economics, Journal of Human Resources, and Health Affairs and has been presented at the annual meetings of the American Economic Association.

Her current research focuses on labor market dynamics including skills mismatch, youth labor market attachment, migration, and the impact of health care reform on employers. She is currently a co-principal investigator on Russell Sage Foundation Project #85-14-05, “Upskilling During the Great Recession: Do Employers Demand Greater Skill When Workers Are Plentiful?”

Modestino holds both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, where she also served as a doctoral fellow in the Inequality and Social Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government.

Dan O’Brien is an assistant professor of public policy and criminology, as well as the research director for the Boston Area Research Initiative, an interuniversity program based at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies that pursues and fosters an urban research agenda for the digital age. His research examines the behavioral and social dynamics of urban neighborhoods, with a particular focus on models of collective function and decline, including “broken windows theory.” He is active in the emerging field of urban informatics, using large, administrative data sets (i.e., “big data”) in conjunction with traditional methodologies to study the city. With a PhD in evolutionary biology (Binghamton University, NY) he takes an interdisciplinary approach, using urban systems as a model for understanding human societies more broadly. He is also editor of the journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences.

Richard O’Bryant is an assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University and a senior research fellow at the Center for Urban and Regional Policy. His courses include Science, Technology and Public Policy, Urban Policies and Politics, Current Issues in Cities and Suburbs and Economic Institutions and Analysis. His recent publications include Low-Income Communities: Technological Strategies for Nurturing Community, Empowerment and Self-Sufficiency at a Low-Income Housing Development, a monograph published in 2005 in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s National Forum on Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Higher Education for the Public Good, and a review of Media Access: Social and Psychological Dimensions of a New Technology Use, published in February 2005 in the New Media and Society Journal. His current research interests are information technology and civic, social, and political participation.

Professor O’Bryant served as co-principal investigator of the Camfield Estates/MIT Project, funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, that included making wireless connectivity available to residents of Camfield Estates, located in Roxbury, Massachusetts. His professional experience also includes serving as a senior software engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation (now HP-Compaq). He was one of five recipients of the 2002-2003 National Rising Scholars Award to Advance Research on Higher Education for the Public Good. He is a long-time member of the Concerned Black Men of Massachusetts, a volunteer organization that works with young black males on positive self-development. In 1997 and 1998 Richard served as fellow in MIT’s renowned Community Fellows Program. He received his undergraduate degree in computer systems engineering from Howard University and a Ph.D. in urban and regional studies from MIT in 2004.

Dietmar Offenhuber is Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in the departments of Art + Design and Public Policy. He holds a PhD in Urban Planning from MIT, a MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, and a Dipl. Ing. in Architecture from the Technical University Vienna. Dietmar was Key Researcher at the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute and the Ars Electronica Futurelab and professor in the Interface Culture program of the Art University Linz, Austria.

His research focuses on the role of new technologies and representation in urban governance and civic discourse. Dietmar led a number of research projects investigating formal and informal waste systems and has published books on the subjects of Urban Data, Accountability Technologies and Urban Informatics. His PhD dissertation received the Outstanding Dissertation Award 2014 from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, his research received the Best Paper Award 2012 from the Journal of the American Planning Association.

In his artistic practice, Dietmar frequently collaborates with the sound artist Markus Decker and composers Sam Auinger and Hannes Strobl under the name “stadtmusik”. His artistic work has been exhibited internationally in venues including the Centre Pompidou, Sundance and the Hong Kong International Film Festival, ZKM Karlsruhe, Secession Vienna, the Seoul International Media Art Biennale. His awards include the first price in the NSF Visualization Challenge, the Jury Award at the Melbourne International Animation Festival, the Art Directors Club Silver Award, a Special Mention at the 12th International Media Art Biennale WRO07 and Honorary Mentions from File Festival, Ars Electronica and Transmediale, Berlin.

Stephanie Pollack J.D., Harvard Law School Associate Director of Research, Dukakis Center for Urban & Regional PolicyLecturer, Law and Public Policy Program

Stephanie Pollack is Associate Director of the Kitty & Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy, overseeing the Center’s research agenda as well as conducting her own research projects in the areas of transportation policy, transit-oriented development, sustainability and equitable development. Pollack is also on the core faculty for the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, teaching courses to graduate students in the Law and Public Policy program and teaching and supervising internships for the Masters in Urban and Regional Policy program. Her courses include Strategizing Public Policy, Introduction to Law and Legal Reasoning, Housing Policy and Transportation Policy.

Pollack is active in public policy issues affecting transportation, sustainable development and the environment in Massachusetts. She co-chaired Governor Deval Patrick’s 2006 transition working group on transportation and served on Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s Climate Action Leadership Committee in 2009-2010. She currently serves on the boards of Boston Society of Architects, Charles River Watershed Association, Health Resources in Action and MoveMass.

Before coming to Northeastern in 2004, Pollack was a senior executive and attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation, New England’s leading environmental advocacy organization. During her two-decade career at CLF, Pollack worked on issues including transportation and transit policy, smart growth and sustainable development and childhood lead poisoning. From 2004 through 2010 she was also a partner in the strategic environmental consulting firm BlueWave Strategies LLC, where she advised clients on smart growth, transit-oriented development and other “green” real estate projects.

Pollack received both a BS in Mechanical Engineering and a BS in Public Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Affiliate Faculty

Daniel Faber Ph.D. University of California at Santa Cruz Professor of Sociology and Director of the Northeastern Environmental Justice Research Collaborative

DANIEL FABER is Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University and Director of the Northeastern Environmental Justice Research Collaborative (NEJRC). His research is focused in the areas of political economy and crisis theory, environmental sociology and policy, social movements, classical and contemporary social theory, environmental justice, philanthropy, Central America and underdevelopment, climate change, and globalization. He co-founded and worked as Research Director for the Environmental Project On Central America (EPOCA), Earth Island Institute (1984-90), and has published numerous works on the political ecology of Central America. He is also a co-founding editor of the international journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, and a participating editor with Latin American Perspectives. He is the author of Environment Under Fire: Imperialism and the Ecological Crisis in Central America (Monthly Review Press, 1993), recognized by Choice Magazine as an “1993 Outstanding Academic Book of the Year on Latin America.”

His most recent work is concerned with problems of environmental injustice and equity in America, and includes the edited collection, The Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Environmental Justice Movements in the United States (Guilford Press, 1998) and Capitalizing on Environmental Justice: The Polluter-Industrial Complex in the Age of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefied, 2008), which was a finalist for the prestigious C.W. Mills Award in 2009. Dr. Faber has produced a number of major research reports relating to environmental justice, including Green of Another Color, which assesses relations between the foundation community and the U.S. environmental justice movement. Another major study includes, Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards 2005: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the co-edited collection Foundations for Social Change: Critical Perspectives on Philanthropy and Popular Movements (Rowman & Littlefied, 2005).

Dr. Faber is a board member of the Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow (AHT), a coalition of scientists, health professionals, environmental advocates, and labor unions working for a precautionary approach to environmental policy in Massachusetts. He also serves as Coordinator of the New England Environmental Justice Research Network (EJRN), and is a co-founding board member of the Massachusetts Environmental Justice Alliance.

In 2006, Dr. Faber received the “Champion for Justice Award,” granted by the Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow (AHT), and the “Friend of the Earth and Environmental Justice Award” from Salem State College and HealthLink for his “path-breaking leadership and work in Environmental Justice in Massachusetts and beyond.” In 2010 he received the Environmental Sociology Practice and Outreach Award from the Environmental Sociology and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association. He has also received recognition for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and many other organizations for his work in advancing a more transformative environmental justice politics. He is currently working on a new report on climate justice, ecological refugees, and equitable policy approaches for dealing with global warming.

During 2014-2015 John Auerbach is on a temporary academic leave to serve as the Senior Policy Adviser to the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is a Distinguished Professor of Practice in Health Sciences and the Director of the Institute on Urban Health Research and Practice at Northeastern University.

He was the Commissioner of Public Health for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from 2007 to 2012. Under his leadership the Department developed new and innovative programs to address racial and ethnic disparities, to promote wellness (including the Mass in Motion campaign), to combat chronic disease and to support the successful implementation of the state’s health care reform initiative.

Prior to his appointment as Commissioner, Auerbach had been the Executive Director of the Boston Public Health Commission for 9 years during which time health equity, emergency preparedness and tobacco prevention became priorities. In addition to the city’s public health programs, he oversaw Emergency Medical Services, homeless services and substance abuse services for Boston.

He had previously worked at the State Health Department for a decade, first as the Chief of Staff and later as an Assistant Commissioner overseeing the HIV/AIDS Bureau during the early years of the epidemic.

John Portz Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor

Expertise: Education Policy, State and Local Government, Public Leadership

Dr. Stephen Flynn is Professor of Political Science, founding Director of the Center for Resilience Studies, and Co-Director of the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. In September 2014 he was appointed by Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson to serve a member of the Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Council (HSSTAC).

Professor Flynn is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on enterprise resilience, critical infrastructure assurance, and transportation and supply chain security and resilience. He holds research affiliations with the Wharton School’s Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, Columbia University’s National Disaster Preparedness Center, and the Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute. He received the M.A.L.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, in 1990 and 1991.

In 2008 he served as the lead homeland security policy adviser for the Presidential Transition Team for President Barack Obama. Prior to September 11, 2001, he was selected to be an expert advisor to U.S. Commission on National Security (Hart-Rudman Commission), and following the 9/11 attacks he was the executive director of a blue-ribbon Council on Foreign Relations homeland security task force, again co-led by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman. From 2003-2010 he served as a member of the National Research Council’s Marine Board.

Dr. Flynn has presented expert congressional testimony before the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives on 28 occasions. A dynamic and accomplished public speaker, he has delivered keynote addresses at more a hundred international and national conferences. Dr. Flynn is a frequent media commentator and has appeared on Meet the Press, 60 Minutes, The News Hour, The Today Show, the Charlie Rose Show, CNN and on National Public Radio. He has written two of the most widely-cited books on homeland security: The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation (Random House, 2007) and America the Vulnerable (HarperCollins 2004). Five of his articles have been published in the prestigious journal, Foreign Affairs. Excerpts of his books have been featured in Time, as the cover story for U.S. News & World Report, and as the subject of two CNN documentaries.

A 1982 graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Dr. Flynn served in the Coast Guard on active duty for 20 years, including two tours as commanding officer at sea, received several professional awards including the Legion of Merit, and retired at the rank of Commander. As a Coast Guard officer, he served in the White House Military Office during the George H.W. Bush administration and as a director for Global Issues on the National Security Council staff during the Clinton administration.

He is the principal for Stephen E. Flynn Associates LLC, where he provides independent advisory services on improving critical infrastructure security and resilience.

Dan O’Brien is an assistant professor of public policy and criminology, as well as the research director for the Boston Area Research Initiative, an interuniversity program based at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies that pursues and fosters an urban research agenda for the digital age. His research examines the behavioral and social dynamics of urban neighborhoods, with a particular focus on models of collective function and decline, including “broken windows theory.” He is active in the emerging field of urban informatics, using large, administrative data sets (i.e., “big data”) in conjunction with traditional methodologies to study the city. With a PhD in evolutionary biology (Binghamton University, NY) he takes an interdisciplinary approach, using urban systems as a model for understanding human societies more broadly. He is also editor of the journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences.

Matthew C. Nisbet Ph.D. and M.S. in Communication, Cornell University BA in Government, Dartmouth College Associate Professor of Communication Studies Affiliate Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs

Expertise: Communication, Journalism, and Advocacy in Politicized Debates over Science, Environment, and Public Health

George Thrush is Director of the School of Architecture at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. His articles include “Ring City: Civic Liberalism and Urban Design” and “Boston’s New Urban Ring: An Antidote to Fragmentation”. His work seeks to connect transportation, urban design, and civic image in an increasingly privatized economic arena. He received his B.Arch. from the University of Tennessee in 1984, and his M. Arch. from Harvard University in 1988. In 2005, his work was celebrated with his entry into the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows.

Area of Research

His research, practice, writing, and teaching all revolve around contemporary urban issues in architecture. The School he heads focuses on design solutions for Boston’s “post-industrial landscape” of former transportation infrastructure and other difficult sites. He is among the primary authors of a comprehensive regional transportation and development proposal for the Boston metropolitan area called The New Urban Ring.

Jane Amidon is a Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of the Urban Landscape Program in the Northeastern University School of Architecture. Jane teaches studio, lecture and seminar courses focused on the ideas, histories and design strategies of changing cities.

Jane has lectured and published extensively on contemporary urban landscape and the related topics of modernism and modernization of the American landscape. Recent publications include “Big Nature,” in Design Ecologies: Essays on the Nature of Design (Blostein and Tilder, eds) and “Eclogue for the Metropolis,” in PRAXIS Journal v. 10. Published books include Radical Landscapes: Reinventing Outdoor Space (2001) as well as monographs on Kathryn Gustafson (2005) and Dan Kiley (1999). She served as the founding editor for Source Books in Landscape Architecture series. In 2011 she co-organized the symposium Landscape Complexity and Transformation with The Cultural Landscape Foundation, and continues to lecture at universities and institutions internationally.

Professor Wendy Parmet, a leading expert on health, disability and public health law, directs the law school’s JD/MPH program with Tufts University School of Medicine as well as the Program on Health Policy and Law. In the spring of 2003, she was named a Matthews Distinguished University Professor, an award that recognizes and furthers the scholarly and creative activities of prominent Northeastern University faculty. She is also a co-editor of the law school’s SSRN online publications, Human Rights and the Global Economy and the Northeastern University School of Law Public Law and Legal Theory Paper Series.

Professor Madison holds a joint appointment in the School of Law and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. Her primary research is in the areas of health law, health policy and health economics.

After receiving her undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley, Professor Madison worked for two years as a research assistant with the health care consulting firm now known as the Lewin Group. She then received a JD from Yale Law School and a PhD in economics from Stanford University before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 2001. She joined the Northeastern faculty in 2011.

Much of Professor Madison’s work evaluates the implications of the health care data revolution for patients, providers and regulators. In “Regulating Health Care Quality in an Information Age,” Professor Madison argues that the health care information revolution will produce a shift from more traditional market-displacing regulation to more market-oriented regulatory approaches. In “Hospital Mergers in an Era of Quality Improvement,” she examines the use of quality measures in antitrust litigation. In “The Law and Policy of Quality Reporting,” she explores the theory and practice of health care quality reporting and comments on settlement agreements related to insurers’ provider rating mechanisms. In “From HCQIA to the ACA: The Evolution of Reporting as a Quality Improvement Tool,” she explains how two different types of reporting, health care quality reporting and physician-related reporting to the National Practitioner Data Bank, could be combined to improve health care quality. In “Donabedian’s Legacy,” she documents the increasing focus on quality issues over time and discusses the way quality law and policy might change in the future. In “Building a Better Laboratory,” she examines how federal policy makers currently support health system experimentation and suggests how they might promote even more. In “Health Regulators as Data Stewards,” she describes federal policies that make data bigger (through data generation, collection, aggregation, facilitation, and funding) and smaller (through initiatives that analyze and distill data). She argues that as data stewards, health care regulators should develop and manage data so as to inform their own regulatory decisions.

Professor Madison has also written on a variety of other health-related topics. Her most recent work involves analysis of the law and policy of employer incentives for healthy behaviors, such as insurance premium or copayment differentials tied to employees’ weight or smoking status.

David Lazer Ph.D. University of MichiganDistinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Science

David Lazer is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, and Co-Director, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. His research focuses on the nexus of social networks, computational social science, and collaborative intelligence. He is the founder of the citizen science website “Volunteer Science.” His research has been published in such journals as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the American Political Science Review, and the Administrative Science Quarterly, and has received extensive coverage in the media, including the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, and CBS Evening News.

Suzanne Lanyi Charles Ph.D. Harvard Graduate School of DesignAssistant Professor, School of Architecture

Suzanne Lanyi Charles is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at Northeastern University. Dr. Charles’s scholarly interests include residential redevelopment and neighborhood change. Her current research examines physical, social, and economic changes in postwar suburban neighborhoods. Her research has received research grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Real Estate Academic Initiative at Harvard University.

Prior to joining Northeastern University, Dr. Charles was an Assistant Professor in the Taubman College of Architecture at the University of Michigan where she was awarded the 2013 Faculty Excellence Award. Dr. Charles is a licensed architect and has worked at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Paris, France and as a Vice President at Booth Hansen Architects in Chicago. She received her doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.